ONGC Chairman and CEO Arun Kumar Singh on Tuesday announced a ₹2,000 crore alternative investment fund for deeptech energy start-ups at IIT Bombay. The oil major signed a tripartite memorandum of understanding (MoU) between MC²⁺ Foundation, IIT Bombay, and the institute’s start-up incubator SINE,.
The scheme is structured under Petronet LNG to sidestep what Singh described as “excessive pains of governance”, and brings together ONGC, HPCL, Indian Oil, BPCL, GAIL, Oil India, and Petronet LNG under a single mandate for energy-sector start-up support.
Of the roughly ₹5.45-lakh crore committed nationally to the start-up ecosystem, Singh said only 2 per cent reaches the energy sector and a mere 0.15 per cent flows into oil and gas.
Under the scheme’s first phase, up to 30 start-ups will receive up to ₹50 lakh each in convertible funding, with an additional ₹1.5 crore available in milestone-based funding, separate from the ₹2,000 crore AIF corpus. The deadline for applications is September 15. The scheme had drawn over 700 registrations ahead of the event.
ONGC has previously invested ₹88 crore supporting 326 start-ups and holds approval for an additional ₹400 crore in R&D spending. Singh said interactions with roughly 500 deeptech start-ups through the Bharat Innovate initiative found that 90 per cent needed market access rather than capital. “The market is the main bloodline for start-ups,” he said.
The seven focus areas under MC²⁺ Ignite are AI-driven subsurface intelligence, next-generation drilling and well completion technologies, hydrogen and mobility, bioenergy with a focus on compressed biogas, refinery process intensification and catalysis, digital asset management, and broader energy transition innovations.
Singh flagged the cost burden of deepwater exploration, where a single well can cost ₹600-1,500 crore, as a particular priority, with the government having separately committed ₹84,000 crore to deepwater exploration.
IIT Bombay Director Shireesh Kedare and SINE head Nishant Sharma also addressed the gathering. SINE, which has backed 324 start-ups and seen ₹9,204 crore raised against ₹67 crore invested, will serve as an MC²⁺ node under the MoU. The tripartite agreement was formally exchanged between ONGC’s ED and Chief Corporate Strategy Ratnesh Kumar and IIT Bombay Dean of R&D Shrikrishna Kulkarni.
Aniruddha Pandit, Vice Chancellor of ICT Mumbai, pointed to structural friction in PSU procurement as a barrier to adoption, noting that new vendors typically cannot enter an oil PSU without prior registration elsewhere in the sector. “This attitude needs to be changed if you really want to see MC²⁺ Ignite take a quantum jump,” he said.
The Mumbai event follows the formal launch of MC²⁺ Ignite at IIT Madras on August 19 by Petroleum Secretary Neeraj Mittal, and a Pune City Connect held on September 3. A start-up showcase at the event featured founders from Sagar Defence, String Bio, WellRx, AngelBot AI, and VDT Pipeline Solutions.